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It turns out there’s another atheism I don’t like. (If you’re missing a context here, consult the last post on this blog, about atheist activists who deserve more press than Richard Dawkins.) I wrote last Halloween about why I need this community, how focusing exclusively on the Dawkbros makes life harder for progressives who depend on an atheist movement. There’s only one school of atheist thought I hate more than the angry white male one, and I hate it far more: it’s the approach that slams organised atheism but shows no interest in making it work. I’m taking about faitheists.

Around this time year, when Chapel Hill antitheist Craig Stephen Hicks shot his three Muslim neighbours dead, a slew of posts appeared in part of the atheist blogosphere, claiming their authors had been proven right: new atheism was irretrievably terrible, antireligious movements unsalvageable. The triple murder of Deah Barakat and Yusor and Razan Abu-Salha had everything to do with our community—chillingly, Hicks and I had a number of mutual Facebook friends, and I’ve written plenty about his kind of politics—but it didn’t prove anything about religion being good or bad.

Since today’s atheist movement took off, its ideas have directly brought about human deaths exactly once. Every day, religious ideas kill thousands of people. (Fasting. Denial of medicine. Genital cutting. Suicide. Sectarian violence. Execution.) That doesn’t alter the problem of racism in atheism, or mean Hicks isn’t our reponsibility—but it does highlight the double standard of those who blamed antitheism itself for the shootings. When movement atheism has problems, they are invariably inherent; religions’ problems are all extrinsic, with no import on the value of faith.

More regularly than I’d like, I get mistaken for someone hostile to the atheist movement, a Chris Stedman or CJ Werleman. When I roll my own eyes at the Dawkbros, it’s because I need a godless community—because my atheist movement is about helping survivors of spiritual abuse, giving apostates safe places, fighting the exploitation of children; about secular mental health support, civil rights work and social provision. I take on infighting because it’s necessary, because I’m invested in building the environment without which I and others can’t manage.

The people who used Chapel Hill as one more excuse to tear atheism down? I’ve never seen them doing that work. When I look at any of them, I don’t see people building a better movement—or to build anything. I never see them highlighting the parts of our community that deserve praise, or holding religion’s feet to the fire. I see beneficiaries of exceptionalism, pandering to anti-atheist sentiment, signing book deals with religious presses, appearing on Fox News, chewing the fat with believers about how vile the nasty, movement atheists are while letting religion off every hook.

I don’t know what the faitheists are here for. It’s hard enough building an antitheism that isn’t terrible without being erased—hard enough fighting the Dawkbros, making the case for an atheist movement progressives respect, without having one’s work pissed on—but I don’t know what their investment is in criticising a movement they treat as irredeemable; don’t know why they bother at all, except to cash cheques with the religious. Atheism matters to some of us, and our criticism is constructive. If others have nothing to contribute, I wish they’d just fuck off.

I get it if you’d rather I discussed the brouhahas—the CFI/Dawkins Foundation merge, Richard’s second epistle to the Muslima, that chain of tweets, that disinvitation. I could do that, and maybe make a decent fist of it—could give you another flowchart, another acrostic, some more zingers. Right now, I just don’t care. There are other poststoberead; there will be other times to mock the movement Dawkins inspired, one that often insists it isn’t a movement, which hasn’t moved since 2006, but sits stickily back, wanking to the thought of its own rightness. Progressives spill a great deal of ink over that movement, talk that’s as cheap as it is lucrative. I want to talk about the other one.

Over the last twenty-four hours, with media fixated on Dawkins’ absence from one upcoming convention, atheists have been gathered at another in Houston. The Secular Social Justice conference, sponsored jointly by half a dozen orgs, highlights ‘the lived experiences, cultural context, shared struggle and social history of secular humanist people of color’. Sessions address the humanist history of hip hop, the new atheism’s imperialist mission and the lack of secular scaffolds for communities of colour in the working class US, whether for black single mothers or recently released incarcerees. Perhaps we could talk about this?

‘When African-Americans across the economic spectrum look to social welfare,’ convenor Sikivu Hutchinson writes, ‘they are more often than not tapping into . . . faith-based institutions. . . . Atheists who bash religion but aren’t about the business of building [alternatives] are just making noise.’ ‘There are compelling reasons’, Hutchinson wrote last autumn, ‘for black women to be attracted to atheism. The stigma of public morality, fueled by white supremacy and patriarchy, has always come down more heavily on black women. Religious right policies gutting reproductive health care disproportionately affect poor and working class black women.’

I dreamt about David Bowie last night. I forget the details, but I woke up thinking I’d write a post about how he seemed to regenerate rather than age. (The first Bowie was Cockney and a mod, the second was Byronesque, et cetera.) The first thing I saw on starting my computer was a friend’s Facebook post: ‘I don’t think I ever really believed it was possible.’ The headline underneath took me a moment to digest: ‘David Bowie, the Legendary Musician, Has Died at 69.’ Oh no. Don’t say it’s true.

While there was me, I’d always assumed, there would Bowie. At eight, a clip of Ziggy’s arm round Mick Ronson was a queer wake-up call, and later ‘Life on Mars’ would help keep suicide at bay. Having died three short days after a new album’s release, it seems music sustained him too, and it hurts to have been denied the songs the twelfth or thirteenth Bowie would have made. After ten years away, The Next Day and Blackstar were considered two of his best records, and it would be a fair statement that he meant far more to me than any other singer.

It would also be fair to call him a child rapist. (Details ahead.)

Bowie did bad things alright. In the seventies he fixated on Nazis, calling Hitler one of the first rock stars and himself a believer in fascism—a phase which, to be fair, he grew out of and came to call ghastly. More disturbing are the stories of hotel room threesomes with fourteen year old girls. Former groupie Lori Mattix describes Bowie disrobing and having her wash him in the bath before ‘devirginising’ her. Both Mattix and the friend of hers who joined them later had been plied with drugs.

It’s hard to know what to do with this knowledge except rehearse it. I know the above to be true, according to Mattix’s nostalgic account, and that it deserves to be remembered. I also know without Bowie, my own obit would have been written long ago, and I can’t help but remember that too. How do you find room in one eulogy for both those facts? Just for today, I’ll mourn the hero I saw in Bowie, thankful on behalf of the kid who needed all those songs; tomorrow and the next day I’ll let one more hero go. That’s the best I can manage—sorry if it’s not enough.

It’s the legend more than the man I’m grieving in the end, the performances that have stayed with me. ‘Starman’, aforementioned, on Top of the Pops, a Technicolor explosion in a monochrome world. ‘Footstompin’’ on Dick Cavett’s programme, Bowie’s mic trained on joyous, gyrating Ava Cherry. ‘Under Pressure’, where Annie Lennox stares undiluted lust at him after that last breathy note. ‘Heroes’ live in Berlin, where Bowie’s voice rises over six minutes from a mumble to a shout. And then, of course, this week, the video to ‘Lazarus’.

You wouldn’t call it a live act, but surely that’s the point. How much sense it makes now, that song that was so inscrutable days ago, the deathbed pose, title and lines about release, even the rush to productivity between this album and the last, the decision not to tour or perform. Unmissable as it is in hindsight—how visible the cancer’s impact is, quite suddenly—no one took ‘Lazarus’ literally because no one imagined Bowie could die. How unlike anybody else, how entirely like him, to stage his own death as performance art. Now ain’t that just like me?

Hard to think someone who did that could have much faith in any afterlife. (Bowie, for his part, called himself ‘not quite an atheist’.) I don’t often wish I believed in one, and it’s hard to wish heaven on a man with his history, but at eight I longed to travel to Ziggy’s world. It hurts to know for the first time that where he is, I can’t follow. But I do live in David Bowie’s world—the world where everyone followed his tune, where he was sometimes a hero, sometimes a monster, always singular. I don’t feel good about all of that. All the same, I’m glad it was my world too.

‘I don’t really understand what biphobia is,’ a partner told me once. It was, he felt, a useless word. ‘If you’re a male bisexual, you’re normal except attracted to guys. The only people who object are homophobes.’ Like so many gay men, he thought the bi label was a way of clinging to a comfortable life, one foot in the straight camp for appearances’ sake. ‘You seriously think it’s harder to come out as bi?’ he asked when I said it had been for me. ‘Then you have no idea what you’re talking about.’ (‘To say it’s worse for bi people,’ he added later on, ‘I just found ignorant.’)

In the US, a quarter more bi men than gay men live in poverty, while fifty percent more abuse alcohol and contemplate suicide. Three times as many bi women as lesbians are raped, a third more abused by partners, two thirds more severely beaten by them. (Their numbers are also far worse than straight women’s.) Bi men are sexually assaulted more than gay men are and abused by their partners fifty percent more. Police attack three times as many bisexuals as monosexuals, and health workers place bi patients at risk of undiagnosed STIs by asking about their activities with one sex and not the other.

I could have offered statistics like those about our comfier, more normal lives. Instead I talked about my own. When the other guy informed people he was gay, how many told him he was lying or in denial? How many other gay men said he was untrustworthy and spread diseases? How many people said he should make up his mind, or wasn’t really gay? That he was misleading partners and making things more difficult for real gay people? How many kept calling him bi, despite him saying he wasn’t? ‘Wait,’ he replied. ‘Your point is that people don’t believe you’re bisexual? Why do they have to?’

If he wanted to understand biphobia, I said, he only had to listen to himself—but he insisted people not understanding something didn’t mean they were bigoted. ‘Instead of blaming them and calling them biphobic, it’s important to educate them. When the reaction is aggressive and defensive, of course people start to form their own weird opinions. You think every time someone makes a stupid comment about gays, I should just freak out? How is that supposed to help? It won’t change their mind. I’d rather stay put and explain. If you don’t have any patience, don’t moan about people not getting it!’

It’s conceivable people who disparage bisexuals should be able to reason for themselves, but cis gay men regularly tell LBTs to pipe down and be more polite, that they didn’t get where they are today with confrontation, anger or entitlement; that we won’t make strides of our own till we accept we owe people an education who demean and degrade us nonstop. Forget Stonewall and who was there, that bi people threw bricks at police while homophiles told them and poor, black, brown, Jewish and trans queers to be quiet: abandoning self-respect was what Pride was all about.

Shut up, I’m talking

Anger has changed my mind plenty of times, and I know mine has changed other people’s—alienating those you care about, it transpires, is a good incentive to adjust how you act—but when at-risk groups are told we need to school people who treat us badly, it’s always as if there’s no overlap. Bi people need to educate gay and straight people, not to scream at them. Trans people need to educate cis people, not to bully them. Black people need to educate white people, not to frighten them. People with disabilities need to educate people without, not throw a fit. It’s always one or the other.

I told the other bloke what people like me tell people like him, that it isn’t marginalised people’s duty to be teachers—but I think there’s another issue here. Lots of us want to be educators, and we know the difference between being listened to and being talked over, between salient, responsive questions and irrelevant ones—between privileged people who know where their knowledge ends and those who speak like they know more than us. We know the ones who value our input are the ones who know we don’t owe it to them. We know the ones who order us to school them are never the ones who want to learn.

Here’s my experience: when someone I’ve called ignorant demands I educate them, they don’t want me to be patient—they want me to have infinite patience, to listen to them affably, without anger, however they behave, and to treat anything they say as valuable. They want me to teach them what I know, but not to act like I know more than them. They don’t want me to assert any control of the discussion, to set limits on what I’m willing to explain, on where and when and for how long, or to impose any kind of boundaries. When they tell me to educate them, what they mean is ‘Shut up, I’m talking.’

Professional educators—teachers, lecturers, instructors, sports coaches, health experts—are authorities in their field who expect to be listened to, not talked over. Good educators expect students to learn on their own instead of being spoonfed; they reward some contributions more than others and impose boundaries on how their students act. Bad educators display infinite patience; good ones are patient but know where to draw the line, as well as how and when to get angry. Good ones nurture relationships with their students but allow bad attitudes to harm them.

When I request input from someone with a background I don’t share—legal advice, tech help, perspective from a black or trans colleague—that’s the kind of relationship I want. When people ask for my input, I sense it’s what they want as well. When I needed an education in the past, getting kicked round the room for being ignorant was a pretty effective one—but when people who’ve just insulted me tell me I’m obliged to educate them, I don’t think an educator is what they want at all. I think what they want is an enabler and a doormat, and I have better things to do than supply one.

Yesterday wasn’t the best day. When I woke up, something was stuck at the back of my mouth, tickling my tongue and making me retch. On peering in, I found my uvula was the size of a wax crayon, pointing forward instead of down. Being December 25, all drop-in centres near me were shut, as was the tube, so getting an anti-inflammatory took four hours’ trudging through rain in shoes with holes in them. My feet are still blistered, and I spent the rest of the day alone in a bedsit with no oven. I could probably be forgiven for being fed up—but strangely enough, I’m doing okay.

There’s a popular view that the word ‘fine’ is meaningless, that being fine, thank you when a friend asks after you is ahollownicety. I wrote about depression back in June, and I’ve heard otherpeople with it say as much. That isn’t my experience at all. When your two basic emotional states are ‘at risk of self-harm’ and ‘not at risk’, fine is the best you can hope for. Fine is precious. I sometimes find myself saying my symptoms come and go. In fact they only alternate: most days, when depression isn’t making me want to die, it makes me more reliably okay than almost anyone I know.

Friday was a crap day to cap off a shit year—a year of family harassment, homelessness and political hopelessness. The art of losing isn’t hard to master, and one does one’s best: I lost family and friends in the spring, watched the left lose in May, lost a place to live in July, lost money in winter. (Thanks, all who helped.) For once, I haven’t managed to lose faith. At the moment, I feel much better than I did in June. What living with depression means for me is that my emotions aren’t linked to external events, that how okay I am doesn’t depend on what happens to me. I’m rarely happy, but I’m almost always fine.Continue reading “The Art Of Being Okay”→

If you follow this blog, you’ve probably come across Brute Reason, where Miri writes lucidly on social justice and psychology. In a recent response to this annoying meme, she notes:

Many atheists have had coercive and abusive experiences with religion. Some consider their time in religious spaces to have been traumatising. And when you’ve experienced a trauma, little reminders of it can be overwhelming. Viewed through this lens, a certain amount of snappiness or impoliteness from an atheist being told “At least your mother is smiling down on you from heaven” makes much more sense.

But there’s another way in which Christian privilege plays out in this situation, and that’s in our perceptions of tone and politeness. . . . While it’s apparently egotistical to reference one’s atheism in response to an explicitly religious comment, it’s somehow not egotistical to offer unsolicited help that’s not what the person needs, without bothering to ask what they need, and then get offended when that help is rejected as irrelevant.

A while back, Miri hired me to create a fresh look for her blog—specifically, a set of promotional images, and more specifically, a new banner. Since hers is some of my favourite writing, I was only too happy to say yes. Since joining this site three Decembers back, she’d been using this one, which is likely how her blog looked the last time you saw it.

Some childish things I put away early—others I stayed attached to for too long. In my last year of primary school, Mrs Fanshawe asked if I had toys and things at my dad’s, gauging, I now suspect, whether to let him collect me at home time. I remember sensing I ought to nod, doing so even as I wondered who the hell still played with toys aged ten. (At the time, I would have said ‘who on earth’.) I knew by then that there was no Saint Nick, except the real one, who was a disappointment of a saint, but it hadn’t been long since I’d found out. I’m never sure whether I grew up too fast or too late.

The garden where Mum and I built snowmen had been a rubbish tip, and our house was designed equally messily. Five doors opened onto the living room, which must have been twelve square metres at most, and only three led into other rooms. Behind Mum’s storytelling chair, a cupboard with two compartments stretched from floor to ceiling. The top one smelt of truffles when you poked your head inside, and was where passports and grownup letters were stored—and, more importantly, chocolate boxes and booze. One night a year a glass of sherry was left out, next to a mince pie and half a carrot.

I think I was nineish when Mum fessed up. I distinctly recall lying in bed, hugging the wall the way I liked to when she prayed for me. Before lights out, we’d talk a while, then she would sing the end of Numbers 6—‘The Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make his face shine upon you’. That night, she told me Nicholas had been a patron of children even during his life—so what did I think their parents told them after he died? It strikes me now this was likely a fairy tale too, that all I’d done was graduate from one fiction to another, but at the time my reaction was one of confusion. In the years since, that hasn’t changed.

People attached to telling children Santa Claus is real often complain I don’t get it. I don’t. It’s never been intuitive to me why telling someone things you know are false—not to safeguard their wellbeing or your own, but just to watch them smile on being duped—is cruel and degrading in principle but twee in one specific case. Learning that Father Christmas was a lie didn’t make me cry or act up, but lied to was exactly how I felt. This year my niece turned eight: being required to play along was hard, and I’ve known parents admit to being more conflicted than they let on.

When friends say stories of a man in a red suit—the other one—made Christmas magical, I think they mean that on some level, they knew makebelieve when they saw it, but that the power of ritual swept them up. I sympathise—all stories are enchantments, all words spells. The trouble is, Father Christmas was more than a story to me, more than something I half believed. I knew the tooth fairy was imaginary, that costumed men who gave us Dairy Milk on the last day of term were imposters—there was enough nudging and winking in each case—but as I saw it, the man himself was every bit as real as God.

Mum came to regret that particular literalism. ‘I made it into something it was never meant to be,’ she told me some years back. There are a lot of memes about Father Christmas and God, some better than others, but in my mind, they occupied exactly the same space. I was used to the idea whatever extraordinary things Mum spoke of must be true (and she spoke of far more extraordinary things than Christian children all receiving gifts on the same night)—to the idea holding extraordinary beliefs was itself virtuous, never more so than if hostile nonbelievers surrounded you.

It wasn’t simply that we were Christians: plenty of children raised in Christian homes are functionally able to distinguish makebelieve from sincere belief (supernatural or not) perfectly well. It was that Mum and her then-church practised an evangelicalism that never drew any such line. Magic, makebelieve, ritual, story, play—these were never acknowledged as mere suspensions of disbelief, or as a realm in which belief might constitute something subtly different. All beliefs were literal, and makebelieve itself was a dangerous and demon-haunted thing: thinking Halloween was only a game was how the enemy got you.

Atheists are often stereotyped as Philistines with one-dimensional worldviews and no grasp of aesthetics or ritual. That described my church upbringing more than it describes me. In my experience, letting stories be stories only strengthens their magic. Believing Santa Claus was real caused me to miss the beauty I now see in the leaving-out of a small sherry and a mince pie, and Mum’s prayers worked because of how she sang, not because she believed—because of a cupboard of secret things, a chair in which fantastic tales were told, and the first snowman in the world that never had to melt.

Even before the war they had played hide and seek. Lucy always discovered the best spots, and whenever Ed thought to trail her they sat conversing silently. Then Peter would use his giving-up voice, stricken with pretend grief and sure they must have died, and Lucy would begin to sob, run out and give the game away — Ed’s fingers folded into fists each time. They hadn’t been in London for the Blitz, but came home to its ruins eventually, and even after everything, there was a horrid beauty to it all, old hiding places gone, new ones waiting to be unearthed.

Ed’s shoulders sloped too much for his brother, and he had far too little time for sports and scavenging, too much for Greek heroes in books. Long before they put on fur coats they had been told to get along, but at school their mother wasn’t around. Stronger boys were how Ed learnt to negotiate, sometimes in front of Peter, sometimes not, but every so often the spite leaked out sideways, and Lucy couldn’t hide from that. Even long after the hatchet had been declared buried, Peter’s eyes blazed with indignation. Bastard. Backstabber. Judas.

Of course Peter had made high king, Peter who only ever needed to have been born first. (Lucy didn’t crave power, which was how she commanded it, but Ed and Susan would exchange a glance when Peter mocked her dreams of girls in strange, familiar clothes.) Mostly Ed’s good name took care of itself. When necessary he rode at Peter’s side, squashed or more often defused uprisings — bargaining, he was known to say, was all that justice was. Only now and then would a servant leave the room swearing Ed had quietly cursed. ‘Bloody Peter.’ ‘Bloody heroes.’ ‘That bloody lion.’

The witch had gutted him at Beruna, and that would have been that had Lucy been at all like him. How he’d clung on, Ed didn’t know, except that finding the stone knife where its last owner fell satisfied some queer part of him, and he’d held onto it. None of the others could look at the thing, but Susan seemed to have some sense of why he needed it. While Ed was being whipped on Christmas Day, each of them had received something — her horn and quiver, Lucy’s vial, Peter’s sword. It was said children who were bad never got anything, but in the end, Ed got the knife.

Today my iPad froze up on the startup screen. I got it just over a year ago on being hired to translate a book, and this was the first time it had happened. Small issues like this afflict gadgets now and then, and ordinarily, I’d have plugged it into iTunes and been back to normal in two minutes—but that was five hours ago. In September, the laptop I bought as an undergraduate finally upped and died, leaving no way to defibrilate the tablet, and nothing but a weather-beaten phone from 2011 on which to work tonight. (If anyone in central London has iTunes and a computer I can plug into, email me.)

Toward the start of September I became homeless. For most of that month and the next, I floated from one sofa to the next. I’ve now been in the same place, precariously and ruggedly housed but secure and rent-free, for just about five weeks. (This had a lot to do with why I was so much more productive last month.) While it’s a huge relief, I now rely on paying £18 for hotspot internet every five days, which makes a significant dent; seeking new work also means I’m facing the costs of travel and ordering documents, and lacking a laptop is now making a financial impact.

When I’m not writing—thanks to those who support me that way—graphic design provides a major part of my income. (Here’s a portfolio.) Although the iPad and tonight my phone are lifesavers, I can’t do that kind of work without a laptop—and without doing that work, I can’t afford one on my own. (The old one’s death also held up several already overdue projects, which I’ve committed to having complete by the new year.) Last week then, I set up a fundraiser at GoFundMe and asked Facebook friends to chip in who wanted to—thanks to a huge amount of generosity, it’s at £605.

I listed my initial target as £1000, which now looks within reach. In the blurb, I also mentioned the possibility I’d extend it to provide a cushion and meet fundraising costs. It turned out that, due to the oddities of Vodafone’s billing schedule, the three-figure phone bill I mentioned having put me in the red hadn’t actually gone through at the time. Thanks, once again, to everyone who’s donated, as the amount contributed so far means that I’ve still escaped my overdraft, but to compensate, I’ve now upped the target to £1200, a goal I think is achievable.

Since my current accommodation is temporary, I’m likely to become homeless again in the new year, or else to be facing the overheads that come with finding a real place to live, so it’s possible that once I have computer and Photoshop access again, I’ll keep the page alive as a jar I can rattle a little whenever things are tough. Prior to Christmas though, replacing the laptop is the priority. (A quick note, tech people: yes, the old one is irreparable. Yes, I’ve looked into it. Yes, I really do require a new one.) This being said, I’m going to ask people reading this to help out a bit.

Here’s the fundraising page. So far, wanting to give it a good start, I’ve held off on posting it here and sharing it aggressively—now I want to push it all the way.

If you’ve chipped in already, all my thanks—it means the world. If you haven’t shared the page with people you know on social media (or have, but could again) please consider doing so. And if you’re able to help out a struggling blogger and feel like doing so, it means more than you can know.

Give £10 and I’ll send a personalised ‘thank you’ email to the address listed with GoFundMe. If you’ve been lurking on this blog invisibly for an age, as it turns out several people who leant me a sofa during September and October had, now’s a good time to say hello. Let’s talk.

Give £25 and I’ll include your name and an optional link to your online profile below all posts in January, with a ‘Special thanks’ line. (People who’ve given already, feel free to claim this perk.)

Give £50 and I’ll devout a post to giving you a shoutout, together with whatever work you do or care about. If you have a developing blog or want to boost the visibility of activism close to your heart, then (provided it’s nothing I can’t stand) I’ll write a short feature on it for my not-inconsiderable audience.

Give £100 and I’ll write a full article or essay-length blog post on a topic of your choice, whether it’s something you think the world needs to discuss more, something you’re looking for answers, advice or explanations on or just something you’d like me to discuss. (This is, of course, subject to my agreement—in the unlikely event I’m not down for your first-choice topic, we can still select one.) Since it’s something my readers tend to like, you can also choose to commission a snark-post, in which I’ll spend a few paragraphs being acerbic on any agreed subject of your choice.

A couple of other things: did I mention people hire me to design things for them? (Here’s that portfolio again—I’ve done blog banners, book covers, logos, t-shirts, promotional fliers and all things in between.) If you’re interested in employing me, drop me an email: I typically charge fifty percent on commission and the rest on completion of things, and in this case, that down-payment can go into the fundraiser.

Oh—and I’m an editor too. A pretty great one, actually. Last autumn an old friend hired me to edit the first article she ever wrote, which then went viral in the press and garnered millions of hits; a year back, another asked my advice for a note to a childhood bully, which gained just shy of twenty thousand Facebook likes and was reported in world news programmes. I copy edited Greta Christina’s well-received book Coming Out Atheist, have worked with a large number of other names from the secular blogosphere, and have spent 2015 editing a first-time author’s novel. If you’ve got a project you want to hire me for, just call.

Again: here’s the fundraiser. Again: if you can’t contribute but do want to help out, please consider sharing it far and wide. If you can donate to this and want to, it means more than I can tell you.

Today my iPad froze up on the startup screen. I got it just over a year ago on being hired to translate a book, and this was the first time it had happened. Small issues like this afflict gadgets now and then, and ordinarily, I’d have plugged it into iTunes and been back to normal in two minutes—but that was five hours ago. In September, the laptop I bought as an undergraduate finally upped and died, leaving no way to defibrilate the tablet, and nothing but a weather-beaten phone from 2011 on which to work tonight. (If anyone in central London has iTunes and a computer I can plug into, email me.)

Toward the start of September I became homeless. For most of that month and the next, I floated from one sofa to the next. I’ve now been in the same place, precariously and ruggedly housed but secure and rent-free, for just about five weeks. (This had a lot to do with why I was so much more productive last month.) While it’s a huge relief, I now rely on paying £18 for hotspot internet every five days, which makes a significant dent; seeking new work also means I’m facing the costs of travel and ordering documents, and lacking a laptop is now making a financial impact.

When I’m not writing—thanks to those who support me that way—graphic design provides a major part of my income. (Here’s a portfolio.) Although the iPad and tonight my phone are lifesavers, I can’t do that kind of work without a laptop—and without doing that work, I can’t afford one on my own. (The old one’s death also held up several already overdue projects, which I’ve committed to having complete by the new year.) Last week then, I set up a fundraiser at GoFundMe and asked Facebook friends to chip in who wanted to—thanks to a huge amount of generosity, it’s at £605.

I listed my initial target as £1000, which now looks within reach. In the blurb, I also mentioned the possibility I’d extend it to provide a cushion and meet fundraising costs. It turned out that, due to the oddities of Vodafone’s billing schedule, the three-figure phone bill I mentioned having put me in the red hadn’t actually gone through at the time. Thanks, once again, to everyone who’s donated, as the amount contributed so far means that I’ve still escaped my overdraft, but to compensate, I’ve now upped the target to £1200, a goal I think is achievable.

Since my current accommodation is temporary, I’m likely to become homeless again in the new year, or else to be facing the overheads that come with finding a real place to live, so it’s possible that once I have computer and Photoshop access again, I’ll keep the page alive as a jar I can rattle a little whenever things are tough. Prior to Christmas though, replacing the laptop is the priority. (A quick note, tech people: yes, the old one is irreparable. Yes, I’ve looked into it. Yes, I really do require a new one.) This being said, I’m going to ask people reading this to help out a bit.

Here’s the fundraising page. So far, wanting to give it a good start, I’ve held off on posting it here and sharing it aggressively—now I want to push it all the way.

If you’ve chipped in already, all my thanks—it means the world. If you haven’t shared the page with people you know on social media (or have, but could again) please consider doing so. And if you’re able to help out a struggling blogger and feel like doing so, it means more than you can know.

Give £10 and I’ll send a personalised ‘thank you’ email to the address listed with GoFundMe. If you’ve been lurking on this blog invisibly for an age, as it turns out several people who leant me a sofa during September and October had, now’s a good time to say hello. Let’s talk.

Give £25 and I’ll include your name and an optional link to your online profile below all posts in January, with a ‘Special thanks’ line. (People who’ve given already, feel free to claim this perk.)

Give £50 and I’ll devout a post to giving you a shoutout, together with whatever work you do or care about. If you have a developing blog or want to boost the visibility of activism close to your heart, then (provided it’s nothing I can’t stand) I’ll write a short feature on it for my not-inconsiderable audience.

Give £100 and I’ll write a full article or essay-length blog post on a topic of your choice, whether it’s something you think the world needs to discuss more, something you’re looking for answers, advice or explanations on or just something you’d like me to discuss. (This is, of course, subject to my agreement—in the unlikely event I’m not down for your first-choice topic, we can still select one.) Since it’s something my readers tend to like, you can also choose to commission a snark-post, in which I’ll spend a few paragraphs being acerbic on any agreed subject of your choice.

A couple of other things: did I mention people hire me to design things for them? (Here’s that portfolio again—I’ve done blog banners, book covers, logos, t-shirts, promotional fliers and all things in between.) If you’re interested in employing me, drop me an email: I typically charge fifty percent on commission and the rest on completion of things, and in this case, that down-payment can go into the fundraiser.

Oh—and I’m an editor too. A pretty great one, actually. Last autumn an old friend hired me to edit the first article she ever wrote, which then went viral in the press and garnered millions of hits; a year back, another asked my advice for a note to a childhood bully, which gained just shy of twenty thousand Facebook likes and was reported in world news programmes. I copy edited Greta Christina’s well-received book Coming Out Atheist, have worked with a large number of other names from the secular blogosphere, and have spent 2015 editing a first-time author’s novel. If you’ve got a project you want to hire me for, just call.

Again: here’s the fundraiser. Again: if you can’t contribute but do want to help out, please consider sharing it far and wide. If you can donate to this and want to, it means more than I can tell you.